Exits
by Ikonopeiston
Summary: AU These are the first two of my Transition series. They are variations on the same theme and involve a much older Nooj than the one seen in the game.


The character herein is the sole property of Square-Enix.

**A/N:** These were written back when I still thought I had the courage to kill off my protagonist. I have since realized I am not yet ready to do that.

The second story here is a revisiting of the first as I continue my experiments in writing.

**EXIT**

**TRANSITION - 1**

He had never expected to grow old, yet here he was. Not old as most would count the days but ancient in his own eyes.

It had been almost a quarter of a century since he had awakened in a hospital room to find that he had been converted into half-man half-machina. The years had not made the situation easier. He still resented the heavy awkwardness of his gait, the clumsiness of his touch. Much to his disgust, his cane had become a part of him as had his spectacles. Life remained difficult.

He was alone. When he thought back over his years of existence, it seemed he had always been alone. There had been intervals when some woman or another, out of pity or curiosity, had invited him to her bed but those had been infrequent and had grown much rarer as time passed. Even in his youth, before he had been maimed, his aloofness had set him apart as austere and untouchable. There had been few intimate relationships with either men or women. Even those had been oddly impersonal and restrained.

In all the years past, his partners in only two affairs stood out in his mind: the flamboyant LeBlanc and the fiercely vital Paine. They had responded to him as a man, not as a freak and for that he was grateful.

Over time he had distanced himself from those who had called him friend and leader. He had deliberately driven them away because he could not bear to hear them praise him for those virtues he knew he did not possess and because, above all things, he hungered for solitude. After a while, he could not muster up the energy to hold the false face before the real one any longer. Here, at the end, he must be himself, plain and unveiled.

Many factors had influenced his life. He had been many persons during the tedious years. He closed his eyes and watched the scenes unreel on the screen of his mind. His orphaned youth spent in the home of his maternal uncle who did not love him had set his feet irreversibly on the path which had led him into a world of emotional suppression and violence. He had gained by courage and ferocity that which had been denied him when he was young and tender.

He had indulged his appetite for cruelty of all sorts. This segment of his life had been carefully hidden and, so far as he knew, was still a secret. Only he, his victims and the governors of the House of Pain knew what he did and none of them knew why he did it.

He was very tired. For so many years he had led these separate existences, as the honourable Warrior and the monster. Then he had picked up a new role - that of the historian. He had repaid the efforts made to restore his body by restoring to Spira much of her history and so he felt he was finished with his duties. There was nothing left for him to do, not anything of any interest. Had it all been worth it? Looking back, he was not sure. All he could be certain of was at the time there had seemed no other choice, not ever.

Now he looked into darkness, emptiness. His eyes, behind the lens of his spectacles, were as vacant as the future he could not see. It was too much effort to lever himself from his chair, take up his cane and hobble from the room in pursuit of - what? He no longer knew. It was too much trouble to shape plans in his mind, too great a burden to formulate a new project to occupy his time. Once there had not been time enough; now there was far too much. Just the lifting of his head exhausted him, that and the motion of his living hand or the stretching of his living leg. He had grown thin and now the prosthetic limbs, designed to match his younger, more robust body were out of scale and more grotesque than ever. Nothing was as it should be any longer; nothing was worth the doing.

The truth was he was bored. None of the challenges which had provoked him in the past were any longer viable. Not even the elaborate scenarios he once devised in his secret explorations of pain had any savour remaining.

There was no emotion left, no passion. He found no juice in his dreams or in his reality. It was as though he was stranded in a desert of the soul where nothing stirred, no change ever took place, a wilderness of empty spaces with no nourishment for mind or body.

He sat, as unmoving as stone, staring into the face of Nothingness, his fervid brain quietening at last. After a long while, Nooj stretched out his hand for the weapon on the table beside him.

**EXIT WITH FLOURISHES**

**TRANSITION - 2**

He had not thought he would live to grow old. He had never expected to survive so long. When, more than a quarter of a century ago, he had first opened his eyes to discover that he still lived, if strangely changed, he had known he owed the universe a death. He had always believed it to be his own. From the time of his near-fatal encounter with Sin, he had awakened each morning to the possibility of imminent death. Each night, he had reached across the empty bed hoping to touch the form of his destined mate - the Dark Empress. So he had never permitted himself to form an attachment to life and its pleasures.

He had never taken the time to examine his expectation of Death or explore his desire for her. Sometimes he thought he had spent his entire life running as rapidly as he could toward the embrace of the Darkness. The pain was a part of it and so were the games with the dagger. That which he took, he also gave. In his need, he did not consider that there might be other endings to the story, that other humans might not share his strange madness. The subjects in the House of Pain were there by choice. Like him, they longed for quietus; unlike him, they were willing to compromise.

As a Warrior, he felt his death must come only when he had given all he could offer to his oath, the one he took when he was commissioned an officer in the Crusaders. He had sworn to defend the land which had given him his education and trained him to be her defender. The fact that his mutilation by Sin had rendered him unfit to any longer hold that commission did not, in his mind, absolve him from keeping his word once given. So he sought his finish on the fields of war, those which were still accessible to him.

Once he had accepted the inevitability of his death, the longing for that ending had taken him like a sudden coup de coeur. He was haunted by the image of a tall strong woman in dark draperies, beckoning him to her embrace. As knights had once plighted their troth to earthly maidens so he made his vows to the dark Queen of Nothingness. In his belief, it was a matter of accepting a certainty with grace and dignity. It was as senseless for him to question his devotion to that lady as it would be for him to doubt his choice of profession.

Now he felt betrayed by his mistress. She had lured him with promises of sweet caresses and healing rest only to abandon him in the end. He had sought to lie down with Death on her cold couch only to find himself left alone and uncomforted on the shadowy desert of life.

He had struggled for so long against such increasingly formidable odds. Shorn of his agility and no longer capable of wielding his heavy two-handed sword, forced to adapt to the despised machina weapon, he had fought on. Limping across the fields where he had once leaped and danced in the complex choreography devised by Death herself, he felt himself diminished, forced to kill from afar, unable to see the light fade from the eyes of his victims, his own person safely out of their reach. He had borne these indignities in the hope of the reward he felt he had been promised.

In the silent room, he closed his eyes and the muscles tightened in his jaw. He was inured to physical pain but knew he would never become resigned to the mental image of all he had lost. He waited for the moment to pass, for the searing memories to subside to the dull ache from which he was never free. Then he waited for the face of his longed for bride to become clear in his vision. When she turned her dark crimson eyes away from him in the final rejection, Nooj muttered aloud, "If it can't be love, it will have to be rape." He reached for the pistol on the table beside him.

Friday, April 4, 2008


End file.
